The Idol Hands of Death

Introduction

It was a time of greed and chaos. The War to End All Wars had ended, not through a decisive advantage of one side, but rather through a collapse in the stalemate. It was a war fought for the right to expand empires wherever possible. Allies and enemies were chosen out of ignorance, moves in grand schemes and ploys. When the War was over, the winners tried to exact exorbitant reparations from the losers. In a sense, the War did not truly end until 1945. (The United States did not sign a treaty with Germany until August 1921.)

The War devastated Europe and Russia. The result was massive starvation. A weakened populace suffered epidemics of influenza and typhus. The worldwide pandemic of influenza killed more than twenty million people in 1918-1919. (In comparison, eight and a half million died as a result of the War.) There are claims that at the height of the influenza epidemic in 1919, every person on the entire planet had been infected (1).

There are good things as well. Einstein announced his theory of General Relativity. Babe Ruth played for the Yankees. Harry Houdini amazed people with his escapes. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. starred in The Mark of Zorro. Gustav Holst premiered The Planets.

On August 26, 1920, American women were given the right to vote. While Britain gave this right to women before America did, it only gave the right to women thirty years old or older.

Post-War Maneuvering by the Victorious Allies

The "winners" in the War got far more than they bargained for, the result of their greed. Britain claimed control of much of the Middle East, with France claiming much of the rest. As described in the excellent book by Fromkin (2):

"At the beginning of 1920, with Britain no longer blocking French ambitions in Syria, the way was clear for the two Allies finally to formulate the terms they would impose on the defeated Ottoman Empire. The terms upon which they then agreed were that the Arabic-speaking portions of the empire were to be detached and divided between the two European powers, with Palestine and Mesopotamia to be kept by Britain; Arabia was to remain independent under British-influenced monarchs, Egypt and the Gulf coast already having been taken by Britain; and Syria, including Lebanon, was to go to France. Palestine, including Transjordan; Syria, including Lebanon; and Iraq were all destined for eventual independence, if one believed the language of the League of Nations Mandates, pursuant to which the Allies awarded these territories to themselves. But France, in particular, regarded the pledge of independence as window-dressing, and approached Syria and Lebanon in an annexationist spirit."

The peace did not last long. The peoples of the Middle East did not want foreigners to rule them. The British government blindly misunderstood this to mean that the locals didn't want the French to rule - and that British rule was desired. The French, of course, believed the same thing - that the locals detested British rule and desired French influence. True experts from the area and the little real intelligence information were ignored; the governments and their agents relied on people who believed they knew what was going on. Political infighting and turf wars added to the confusion.

This led to political disaster after disaster in the area. At least one British and one French government fell out of power as a result of these failures. Nevertheless, the systemic problems remained. When the British and French removed most of their troops from the area after the War "ended", trouble was predestined.

"When the British armed forces occupied the Middle East at the end of the war, the region was passive. But soon troubles began. They began in Egypt, with demands for independence in 1918 followed by rioting in 1919. Next - though there was no immediate apparent connection - war broke out in 1919 in Afghanistan, on the Indian frontier. At about the same time, British policy in Arabia began to come apart. It was possible to believe that it was just bad luck that caused one thing after another to go wrong for Britain in the Middle East; and one could have continued to believe that when tribal disturbances brought disorder to Transjordan or, in the spring of 1920, when the Arabs rioted against Jews in western Palestine, or in the summer of 1920, when Iraq flamed into revolt. An obvious explanation for the disorders, and arguably the correct one, was that, after the war, Britain's garrisons in the Middle East were so undermanned as to embolden Britain's local opponents everywhere to defy her.

The French, weakened in the Middle East, as were the British, by pressures to economize and demobilize, were similarly defied by Arab politicians, against whom they finally went to war in Syria. Russia, defeated in the war and crippled by revolutions and civil war, also faced Moslem revolts and independence movements in Central Asia, her domain in the Middle East. But both the French and the Russians, instead of finding common cause with Britain, intrigued to undermine her position in the Middle East, thus confusing the issue by making it possible to suppose that they were causing (rather than merely adding to) Britain's difficulties." (3)

These were moves typical of the "Great Game", the grand geopolitical maneuvers of the British, the French, the Germans and the Russians throughout the 19th century. Foreign policy was decided based on who was where, who could be used to stop expansion by one of the others, and who could be placed in a position to lose territory.

In the spring of 1919, the Emir of Afghanistan was assassinated. At the time, Afghanistan had been a British protectorate for 12 years, based on an agreement with Russia. In a little more than two months after the assassination, a new leader was in place, decidedly anti-British and pro-Russian. When the Afghans started an invasion of India, there was a brief war. The war was unexpectedly settled through the use of a new weapon - the airplane - which the local tribesmen could not fight. To gain the victory, the British had been forced to spend nearly £15,000,000! (4) Despite their victory, the British conceded independence to the Afghans.

Within two years, there were Russian consulates throughout Afghanistan. The British even learned of secret plans (through a cracked code) for joint Afghan-Russian military actions against the British Empire. (5)

Similar Russian relationships arose with the Turks. The French used an opportunity in 1920 to march into Syria and Lebanon to solidify their hold in the Middle East. The French invasion's side-effect of snubbing British efforts in the region were thoroughly enjoyed.

To make matters worse, the House of Lords approved the partitioning of Ireland late in 1920. Before long, the Irish independence movement started their violent rebellion.

During all of these disasters, the British economy collapsed. There were strikes and riots everywhere. More than a million coal miners stopped work. Other miners, railway and transport workers followed. A state of emergency was declared. In April of 1921, the entire country was paralyzed. It would take three months to negotiate a settlement with the striking miners.

The sickness infected the world economies as well. Inflation raged, bankrupting nations. The German economy was hopelessly bankrupt. The German government had fully expected to win - and thus they planned to pay for the War using reparations they would demand from the losers.

Since the American Senate wasn't interested in getting involved in European affairs, the British and the French worried about how to keep the Germans in line. In order to pay their own costs, the British and the French planned to demand reparations from the Germans. To keep the Germans from rearming, the Allies decided to demand huge reparations, spread over many years. Other crippling clauses were added to the Treaty of Versailles.

Reparation negotiations started early in 1921. Faced with impossible demands, the Germans walked out of the talks. The Allied armies marched back in, occupying German territory. In March, the Allies demanded 1 billion marks worth of gold (about $250,000,000 in dollars) as an initial payment. Germany defaulted on the payment. Despite the default, the Allies returned a month later, calling for a total of 132 billion marks (about 33 billion dollars) to be paid over several years.

Nearing a state of total economic collapse, Germany had no choice but to accept the reparation demands. These demands led to the hyperinflation of the mark in years to come, as the government simply printed money to pay their debts through inflation and borrowing. Of course, this destroyed the German middle class and set the scene for the rise of Hitler, the Nazis and World War II.

In London, there were a lot of fingers pointed in blame for all of the difficulties in Britain. The problems were the result of the Bolsheviks, Turkish plotters, Irish separatists, a Pan-Islam movement, the greedy miners, the Germans, the "world Jewish conspiracy", Standard Oil, the French and a host of other troublemakers. They should have looked a lot closer to home.

Britain and Egypt

The British were typically inept in their handling of Egypt. Britain had "temporarily" ruled Egypt for decades. In 1914, Britain formally announced that it had freed Egypt from Ottoman control. Another announcement proclaimed that independence for Egypt was one of the reasons that Britain was fighting the War. The trouble started when the Egyptians believed these announcements.

Shortly after the War ended in 1918, a delegation of Egyptian political figures were granted an interview with Sir Reginald Wingate, the British High Commissioner in Cairo. These men, who did not hold office, since control rested in the hands of British officials, asked that martial law end, that Egypt's protectorate status end in favor of independence, and that Egypt be heard during the Allied peace negotiations.

Completely rebuffed, the Egyptians, under the influence of Saad Zaghlul, a former judge, administrator, legislator, and minister, decided to agitate for their cause. Zaghlul spoke out in favor of independence. When he tried to continue speaking out, he was prevented from speaking in public by the British. The Sultan of Egypt's ministers resigned en masse. (The Sultan was mostly a figurehead, put in power by the British.) The British arrested Zaghlul and deported him.

To the surprise and consternation of the British, demonstrations and strikes erupted.

"The cables sent from Cairo to London at the time suggest that the Residency had little understanding of what had been happening in Egypt during the wartime years." (6)

Of course, there were many different factions, all trying to push their agendas for Egypt.

"Within the murky world of Egyptian politics, the new Sultan, the Sultan's ministers, and such opposition leaders as Zaghlul, all were maneuvering, sometimes for and sometimes against one another, under the cover of their respective nationalist proposals, to win the support of the various disaffected groups within the Egyptian economy and Egyptian society. Yet of these currents, undermining the structure of the protectorate and threatening one day to sweep it away, the British authorities evinced little awareness. Zaghlul was seen as a mere disgruntled office-seeker, using his political demands as leverage to obtain a government job. According to the Residency in 1917, 'He is now getting old and probably desires an income.' (7)

Yet within a week of his arrest and deportation, demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, and other towns spread to the Delta, led to violence, and were followed by massive strikes. Railroad lines were torn up in key places, in accord, ironically, with a British wartime plan to disrupt the country in the event of an Ottoman invasion. Transport workers struck. On 16 March 1919, a week after Zaghlul's deportation, Cairo's railroad and telegraph communications with both the Delta and Upper Egypt were cut, while foreign colonies were besieged. The flames of disorder raged out of control.

Widespread attacks on British military personnel culminated on 18 March in the murder of eight of them - two officers five soldiers, and an inspector of prisons - on a train from Aswan to Cairo..." (8)

The British feared revolt. They'd seen the possibilities of their massacre in the Indian Mutiny. (It was a frightening thought to be looking down the barrels of hundreds of Enfield rifles...) The rebellion in Egypt presented similar tragic possibilities. The fears were real, despite their possible overemphasis.

"What the High Commissioner's office in the Residency found so shocking in the rebellion was its 'Bolshevik tendency'... Copts demonstrated alongside Moslems. Theological students demonstrated alongside students from the secular schools. Women, albeit only from the upper classes, demonstrated alongside men. (9) What especially unnerved the British authorities was the involvement of the peasantry in the countryside - the placid masses on whose inertia they had counted. Unnerving, too, was the subsequent discovery that the uprising was organized. Suddenly, the British were faced with a local politician who appeared to have a national following - which surprised them and may have surprised him, too.

General Allenby, who was quickly sent out to deal with the situation, arrived in Cairo on 25 March and declared his intention of putting an end to the disturbances. On 7 April he announced Zaghlul's release. British troops gradually restored order in the spring and summer of 1919, but strikes and demonstrations continued.

At the end of 1919 London sent out a Commission of Inquiry under Lord Milner, which concluded that the British protectorate had indeed to be abolished and replaced by some new relationship, the nature of which Britain attempted to negotiate throughout 1920, 1921, and 1922." (10)

Russia

"Until the decade before the First World War, the Russian Empire had been expanding at the expense of its neighbors at a prodigious rate and for a long time. It has been calculated that, at the time, the Russian Empire had been conquering the territory of its neighbors at an average rate of 50 square miles a day for 400 years." (11)

By 1921, Russia was also a disaster. Forced out of the War by the Germans and the effects of the Revolution, the fighting did not end. The Red (Bolshevik) forces were assailed by the White (Czarist) forces. The Whites, financed by a large expatriate support network - including Sidney Reilly, the "Ace of Spies", were successful at first. Their armies marched on Petrograd and Moscow, intent on ousting Lenin from control.

Their success was short-lived. In less than a month, their forces collapsed and they were forced to flee. This did not end their fight, for the Bolsheviks faced other problems. The White cause would continue to wind down until its ultimate death in 1925.

There was a strange little war with the Poles over the Ukraine. The Bolsheviks marched into Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. The Poles pushed them out. The Bolshevik army recovered and retook Kiev. Then they marched on Poland. The Poles "won" by defeating Trotsky at the gates of Warsaw. This essentially preserved the status quo in the region.

The Japanese used the opportunity to take Sakhalin Island.

In the meantime, the harvests of 1920 and 1921 were dismal failures.

"Things were so bad that, given anything in the way of a breathing space, they had to get better. Lenin, seeing this, decided to let nature take its course. He called off the emergency system of expropriations ('War Communism'), by which the government had kept itself going, and instituted a New Economic Policy (NEP) that made small-scale private enterprise legal again. It was enough to do the trick. The NEPmen, as the hard-line Communists slightingly referred to them, slowly brought life back to factory and farm and by 1924, the year of Lenin's death, production was back to something like two-thirds of the prewar level." (12)

Zionism and the Jews

Anti-Semitism was a profound influence on the politics of the time. People and governments found "Jewish cabals" and "Jewish plots" in the most unlikely places. Ironically enough, it was this thinking that provided many of the allies for the Zionist movement.

The Zionists were interested in a Jewish homeland. During the War, the Allies were looking for help. It seemed that the war was going to drag on for years. Any additional help might tip the balance. Woodrow Wilson and the Americans weren't overly interested in helping the Allied war effort.

Interest turned to the "worldwide Zionist organization". The British hoped that by making a promise for a homeland that they might not have to keep, they could gain the support of Jews around the world in the war. Of course, there wasn't a "worldwide Zionist organization", but the Zionists weren't about to tell the British that.

The British were always on the lookout for secret societies. These societies were everywhere in the Middle East. On numerous occasions, the British committed promises to these societies in the hopes that they were as powerful and pervasive as the societies said they were. On every occasion, the British were sadly disappointed.

"When the uprisings in the Middle East after the war occurred, it was natural for the British officials to explain that they formed part of a sinister design woven by the long-time conspirators. Bolshevism and international finance, pan-Arabs and pan-Turks, Islam and Russia were pictured by British Intelligence as agents of international Jewry and Prussian Germany, the managing partners of the great conspiracy. In the minds of British officialdom, bitter enemies such as Enver [Pasha] and Kemal [Ataturk - both 'Young Turk' rivals for control of Turkey] were playing on the same side; and so, they believed, were Arabs and Jews.

British officials of course were aware that significant numbers of Palestinian Arab Moslems, reacting against Zionist colonization, expressed violent anti-Jewish feelings; but this observation did not necessarily negate their view that Islam was controlled by Jewry. Islam, in the sense that Britons feared it, was the pull and power of the the Caliph, whom they viewed as a pawn moved by Britain's adversaries - a view that, oddly, they continued to hold even after the Sultan-Caliph became their virtual prisoner in Constantinople. As they saw it, it was evident that Arabs could not govern themselves; so that the question came down to whether the Arabic-speaking Middle East should be governed by Germans and Jews, acting through the agency of Turks, or whether it should be governed by Britain. The appeal of the British government, they felt, was that it was decent and honest; the appeal of Britain's adversaries was that Turkish government was Moslem government. Islam was thus being used, as was Bolshevism, and as were Turks and Russians, by a cabal of Jewish financiers and Prussian generals to the detriment of Britain.

While in the clear light of history this conspiracy theory seems absurd to the point of lunacy, it was believed either in whole or in part by large numbers of otherwise sane, well-balanced and reasonably well-informed British officials. Moreover, it could be supported by one actual piece of evidence: the career of Alexander Helphand. Helphand was a Jew who conspired to help Germany and to destroy the Russian Empire. He was closely associated with the Young Turk regime in Constantinople. He did play a significant role in selecting Lenin and in sending him into Russia to foment a Bolshevik revolt with a view to helping Germany win the war. He did continue to weave his conspiratorial webs after the war. He was what [several important British officials] believed a Jew to be: rich, subversive, and pro-German.

Against this background, the trend of British Intelligence assessments in the immediate postwar years appears less irrational than would otherwise be the case." (13)

This also gave the British a strong inducement to stick to their wartime promise to help the Zionists gain a homeland, even though it caused difficulties for the British.

"[Winston] Churchill approached the complex, emotion-laden and muddled question of Palestine with a simple, rational, and clear program. He believed in trying the Zionist experiment, and thought that it would benefit everyone. When he visited Palestine after the Cairo Conference, he told a Palestinian Arab delegation on 30 March 1921 that:

it is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national centre and a national home to be re-united and where else but in Palestine with which for 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? We think it will be good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine and we intend it to be so; ... they shall share in the benefits and progress of Zionism. (14)

Churchill had always shown sympathy for Jewish aspirations and for the plight of the Jews persecuted by the czars." (15)

"Churchill was not unmindful of the opposition to Zionism among Palestinian Arabs, but he believed it could be overcome by a program that combined basic firmness with attractive inducements and compromises. As Colonial Minister, he attempted to appease Palestinian Arab sentiment by scaling down Britain's support of Zionism. [He] decided that Zionism was to be tried first only in the quarter of Palestine that lay west of the Jordan river, and nothing was to be decided for the moment about extending it later to the other three-quarters of the country - Transjordan. Moreover, Churchill attempted to redefine the British commitment: he proposed to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine rather than attempt to make Palestine herself into a Jewish entity..." (16)

Churchill was frustrated to discover that the Palestinians weren't interested in negotiating the way that Europeans did. The Palestinians were unwilling to make any offer or provide any concessions. Consequently, the talks stalled, despite Churchill's attempts and remonstrations.

Interestingly enough, the Palestinian Arabs deserve much of the blame for the influx of Jews into Palestine.

"The Zionist plan ... was to avoid encroaching on land being worked by the Arab peasantry and instead reclaim unused, uncultivated land, and by the use of scientific agricultural methods to restore its fertility. The large Arab landholders, however, turned out to be eager to sell the Jewish settlers their fertile lands, too - at very considerable profits. (17) Indeed Jewish purchasers bid land prices up so that, not untypically, an Arab family of Beirut sold plots of land in the Jezreel valley to Jewish settlers in 1921 at prices ranging from forty to eighty times the original purchase price. (18) Far from being forced by Jews to sell, Arabs offered so much land to Jews that the only limiting factor on purchases became money: the Jewish settlers did not have enough money to buy all the land that Arabs offered to them. (19)

Not merely non-Palestinian Arabs but the Palestinian Arab leadership class itself was deeply implicated in these land sales that it publicly denounced. Either personally or through their families, at least a quarter of the elected official leadership of the Arab Palestinian community sold land to Jewish settlers between 1920 and 1928. (20)

The Zionist leadership may have been misled by such dealings into underestimating the depth of real local opposition to Jewish settlement. The British government, on the other hand, misjudged not merely the depth but also the nature of the Arab response: in treating the land issue as if it were valid rather than the fraud it was, Churchill and his colleagues either misunderstood or pretended to misunderstand the real basis of Arab opposition to Zionism. Arab opposition to Jewish settlement was rooted in emotion, in religion, in xenophobia, in the complex of feelings that tend to overcome people when newcomers flood in to change their neighborhood. The Arabs of Palestine were defending a threatened way of life. The Arab delegations that went to see Winston Churchill did not articulate this real basis for their objection to Zionism. Instead they argued that the country could not sustain more inhabitants; and Churchill took them at their word. He accepted their statement that they were objecting on economic grounds; and then he went on to prove that their economic fears were unjustified." (21)

America

America was not untouched by the insanity in the world. The Communist Revolution sparked a major scare in the country. Communists were condemned. There were nationwide raids on radicals.

Railroad strikes were blamed on the Communists. Samuel Gompers demanded the overthrow of Congress for injustices to workers. The millionaire radical William Lloyd and 19 others were found guilty of conspiracy to overthrow the American government. A time bomb exploded on Wall Street; Bolsheviks and "anarchists" were blamed.

The reaction was predictable. A judge in New York ruled that membership in the Communist Party was sufficient grounds for deportation. Many were deported.

1920 also brought Prohibition.

Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge were elected. Offered a chance to join the League of Nations, Harding refused. America had had enough of war and was not interested in playing the games of European politics. Despite several attempts by the British, the Americans were not drawn very far into the intrigues. (One plan called for America to be the protector of Palestine!)

In February of 1921, the US suspended immigration from Central Europe due to the typhus threat.